Nicole Cooke told a parliamentary committee ‘the measures and schemes to fight the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs are inadequate and ineffective – [it’s] the wrong people fighting the wrong war, in the wrong way, with the wrong tools’.
Photograph: John Giles/PA

You know the most remarkable thing about Nicole Cooke’s eviscerating evidence to parliament last week, which detailed staggering cases of institutional sexism by British Cycling, lax responses by the authorities when she reported doping violations and poor governance by some of the most august UK sporting bodies? Nobody denied it. Not one person. Not one authority. No one.

I saw MPs shake their heads several times while they heard Cooke, an Olympic, world and Commonwealth road race champion, tell her story. Some of them looked incredulous when Cooke explained that, as a 19-year-old, she had gone to the UK anti-doping authorities after her Italian team manager asked her to take performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), only to be told “they would not do anything with my evidence”. Only the actions of the Italian police, who had the powers to record conversations, conduct video surveillance and raid houses, led to the arrest of her directeur sportif William Dazzani.

No wonder, as Cooke vividly put it, she felt “the measures and schemes to fight the abuse of PEDs are inadequate and ineffective – [it’s] the wrong people fighting the wrong war, in the wrong way, with the wrong tools”.

Cooke’s comments came to mind 48 hours later when I saw headlines hailing the lack of doping in elite English rugby union. On the surface the news was extremely good: only four positives, all from lower down the pyramid, out of 1,001 tests last season. As an RFU report also highlighted, England’s international players in 15s and Sevens were tested 360 times in 2015-16, up from 135 a season before due to the 2015 Rugby World Cup and the build-up to last year’s Olympic Games. That echoed the findings presented by World Rugby in 2015 which, it said, showed the sport did not have a problem with steroids at the elite level.

Yet – and this brings us back to Cooke’s comments – not everyone in rugby is so bullish that every slab of muscle is the result of protein shakes, creatine and feeling the burn in the weights room. As one senior figure suggested to me: “The testing is nowhere near comprehensive enough to make a statement that rugby is clean. It’s more a confession of inadequate testing than one of no doping.”

In his view every top-flight player should be tested at least four times a year, twice in-season and twice in the preparation phase. For most players it is a lot less. There are 12 teams in the Premiership, each with at least 30 players on their books – yet UK Anti‑Doping conducted 405 tests on English rugby union players in the past nine months, or 45 a month.

There is certainly enough circumstantial evidence to make you wonder. When the journalist Steve Howell was researching his book Over The Line, for instance, he asked a very senior official in Welsh sport how many rugby players he thought were using steroids. He put it simply: “How many aren’t?”. Daniel Spencer-Tonks, an amateur rugby league player who was banned for taking steroids, also claimed doping is “hugely widespread at all levels” and young players feel “pressure to be bigger, faster and stronger”.

The former France prop Laurent Bénézech, who has claimed he was given performance-enhancers during the 1995 Rugby World Cup, cited another problem: the use of cortisone, which “allows an athlete to train more without feeling pain or tiredness – and substantially increases his athletic performance”.

Certainly Richard Ings, the former head of the Australian anti-doping agency, believes more could be done. He told me he considers rugby union and league “high-risk sports for the use of PEDs because of the benefits they provide to strength, power and stamina”.

There’s a second point he stresses too: “Don’t forget that rugby is a sport where injuries are often prolific among players and PEDs are exceptional at keeping otherwise injured players on the park in breach of the rules”.

To be fair to rugby union similar concerns apply across almost every sport, and it would be no bad thing if sporting bodies were more circumspect when it came to their anti-doping programme. History has taught us, after all, that a lack of positive tests doesn’t mean a lack of potential positives.

Ings, though, insists testing is worth it – despite those who fear it is a waste of time because it catches so few - but urges organisations to test players multiple times a season for every possible banned substance. “It’s one thing saying you’ve done this many tests,” he says of the RFU results. “But how many were there for HGH? Or peptides? Or EPO? How many blood tests were there specifically to test prohibitive substances? Sure, such tests won’t catch all the cheats. But you can guarantee that you won’t catch anyone at all if you put in place weak testing.”

Of course testing is only a part of the solution. Better intelligence and greater powers for investigative agencies are essential, as are people like Nicole Cooke. Then again, given how she claims she was ignored during her career, how can we be sure the authorities will listen to the next person brave enough to put their head above the parapet?